Verdad Magazine Volume 35
Fall 2023, Volume 35
Poetry by Brian Beatty
Dog. Bear. Man.
He moved from one town
to the next, meeting strangers
without names at first.
New places and people always
reminded him of that time
in a national park
out west when his dog
started barking himself insane
then a bear appeared
up ahead in the middle
of the hiking trail.
Dog. Bear. Man.
At that moment
none of them
had a name.
Camouflage
Everything
from car keys
to [ ]
to the living,
breathing
woman
you’ve looked
everywhere
for all your adult life
might be hidden
in plain sight.
The Lesser Machinery of Fate in Southern Indiana
What at first I mistook
for a hawk
afloat on
an air current
above a golden ocean
of field corn
awaiting harvest
turned out to be
the lesser machinery
of the farmer’s
giant drone with its swiveling,
zooming video camera lens
I’d been so sure
just moments earlier
was a doomed mouse or rat.
BIO: Brian Beatty is the author of five poetry collections: Magpies and Crows; Borrowed Trouble; Dust and Stars: Miniatures; Brazil, Indiana: A Folk Poem; and Coyotes I Couldn’t See. Beatty’s poems and stories have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Appalachian Journal, Conduit, Cowboy Jamboree, CutBank, Evergreen Review, Exquisite Corpse, Floyd County Moonshine, Gulf Coast, Hobart, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Quarterly, Rattle, RHINO, Seventeen, The Southern Review and Sycamore Review.
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